Visions of economic citizenship in early welfare state France: networks, ideas, and European interwar legacies.

Focusing on the intellectual history of the early welfare state, ECOCIT examines three discourses of economic governance of the early French Third Republic: solidarisme, social Catholicism, and revolutionary syndicalism.

My innovative research hypothesis is that these traditions emerged from a same late 19th century context, marked by rising tensions between an expanding industrial capitalism and the consolidation of mass democracy.

Representing alternative answers to the same set of questions, these discourses not only interacted with each other, but also set the key terms of the later interwar debate on the compatibility between parliamentarism and economic-based forms of citizenship.

Two research objectives follow: examining previously neglected interactions between these discourses and, second, mapping the debate in terms of their vision of the relation between welfarism, democracy, and the state, so as to better trace their interwar legacies.

Methodologically, I integrate the traditional tools of intellectual history with quantitative methods borrowed from sociology – social network analysis, essential for exploring interactions – and a morphological approach developed in the field of ideology studies, important for mapping the welfare debate.

Complementing my previous work on Sorelian syndicalism, the project contributes to a wider research agenda that investigates how late 19th century discourses of economic governance shaped the much more well-known ideological clashes over liberal democracy in the interwar years. A book proposal on this wider theme is among the project’s deliverables.

Besides rejuvenating the historiographies of the three discourses (which fail to address the question of interactions) and granting me competence in new research methods, the project allows me to begin tackling a question that is relevant both to welfare state studies and to the history of political thought, allowing me to develop my work towards greater interdisciplinarity.